Pr Guide to Promoting Designs

Here Is a Pr Guide Prepared by Veteran Public Relations Experts of Designmediators On How to Promote Your Design Works

Promoting good design is one of the easiest PR tasks. Good design itself is usually well demanded by any audiences (i.e. by both readers and editors of publications) thanks to the visual appeal, emotionally provoking aspects and relevance to needs. On the other hand, promoting mediocre design is indeed one of the hardest PR tasks since the limited editorial space deserves better content.Good design is viral; people share it by sending to others or publishing through social networking websites, image sharing platforms and design oriented publication. Bad design does not get shared, and is usually ignored. A good design is especially viral if it can appeal to emotions, or if it has an exceptional beauty. A viral design is unexpected and ignites emotion.Before you start thinking how to promote your design, I would strongly advise you to join the A-Prime Design Award and get a free preliminary check to see how it performs. If you get a score below 5, your design is mediocre, and you better work more on the design rather than spending any advertisement budget or your personal time (and therefore money) on it. If your design has a score of 6 or higher, the rest of the article is for you.Promoting good design is easy, but you need to place some seeds to reach several million impressions of your project; it takes a bit of time and diligence. Remember that each good design would bring you at least several if not dozens of print publication possibilities in addition to mentions in many lifestyle and design magazines. From my experience, equivalent advertising cost of a good design is about fifty thousand euros. But this equivalent value only surfaces if you do your homework.To earn about fifty thousand of euro free marketing for your design, you need to work around 40-48 hours in a very professional manner; i.e. you need to spend a whole week doing nothing but promoting your designs. The first thing you need to do is evaluating your project (remember that you could submit them to A’ Design Award for a free preliminary check or some other competition). If your design does not receive a high score, first you will need to improve your presentation skills; visualization, composition, 3d rendering, photography and creative writing. If you have a good design, start buying all print media publications (design magazines and sector al or niche magazines) that relate to your work, plus buy all design or lifestyle publications that are generally aimed for the design oriented audiences. Before buying magazines, you could check them to see if they publish works similar to yours, if they do note the editor of that section, find her email or contacts through the mast head and send your work directly to her, asking a possibility of publication.Good magazines, respective publications will never ask money from you to publish your design works unless you explicitly state your interest in buying sponsored posts or editorial pages. It will take 2 months to have your first publication. Your chance of getting published is equally proportional to your design score. From our experience a score of 10 or 9 gets published always.Furthermore you could submit to newspapers, international television and other bigger media. Since these publications are not themselves design oriented, they could be asking if you had win any design awards or competitions in the past. Therefore I also advise you to join some paid design awards and budgets. When joining paid awards, double check for further fees or any hidden fees.When joining design competitions you must be clever and make sure not to join any speculative or free design competitions which offer monetary prizes, as they will in most cases take your design rights. I advise you to join a prestigious juried international design award such as the A’ Design Award, or join national design competitions organized by your government. Do not join public voting competitions.The second step is digital publications. While the print and traditional media appearances including TV creates good prestige and fame, the digital publications are more relevant for you as a designer as the digital publications ensure you would be found when people search for designers, and are better for bringing potential design business leads.To market your work to digital publications, start by search. Search for relevant publications in your niche first, find up to hundred resources and magazines, contact them and ask them if they could publish your work. You will need to keep up to their requests of providing text, high-res or differently sized images, make sure you respond timely.Second, search for generic design publications, some of these big design publishers have contact forms that you could use to submit. If they have contact forms, use the forms instead of writing emails; the contact forms never go to spam, while your emails could. Send your designs to at least hundreds of the publications. No pain no gain, or perhaps better; you need to be in to win.Thirdly, search for your competitors names; i.e. designers, artists, architects, design companies or whoever is a direct competitor of yours. Find publications that they got published, and contact them by sending your works. It is usually better to send low-res images at first. When writing emails to editors write it in less than 250 chars, i.e. two tweets.First line, tell who you are briefly, and your intention and question; i.e. ask if it would be possible to publish your work. Second line, tell about your work, if you have a portfolio or website you can provide a link, but make sure your other work is also appealing, otherwise it could backfire. Finish the email by stating that you are open for any questions, comments, inquiries and state that you would send any further information if requested. Please formulate a good sentence of your own, I am not a literature expert. Include in your email your name, surname, name of your work.In essence, you will have to contact one by one about three to five-hundred publications, and a week could be barely enough for this. It is important to make sure that you include the name of the publications in your email; do not send generic emails, i.e. these will usually get ignored. If they do not respond to you, you could re-write in 5 days, do not send more then twice, keep a spreadsheet file to check progress and any eventual mentions.Furthermore, you will need to create accounts at portfolio websites. These are websites and platforms where designers post their own works. They are usually not useful, but could be very useful if you create these first and ask editors to check for further works later; they could also be useful for prospective clients to understand your capabilities. For each portfolio website, post only your very best works.Create around ten or twenty portfolios, use any and all portfolio service you could find on web (read terms to ensure you do not loose design rights), and link them to your website, so that you do not need to spend time updating them every time; people could check your new works at your website or social networking page. Sometimes, editors might just publish your work and not tell you, remember to set up search engine email alerts to follow mentions.Create a fan page in social networking sites, post content about your recent works. Follow and contact editors through social platforms, ask them to feature your works in their own social pages. This will help you reach a latent audience which is not actively checking for online or print publications. Spread the world yourself by engaging audiences who follow your posts. You might occasionally want to design fun or purely artistic works just to get attention. In your website and social network pages, publish the fact that you got published; if a print magazine features your work, put the cover of the magazine and the page where your work is featured at your website and social networking page. If a digital publication features you, save it as PDF (for archiving), and of course post its’ link to your social networking page. Let people know that you are getting featured and published.If you need further help, you could contact DesignMediators, who professionally do these tasks for their clients. You could also buy PRHow packages for content distribution. In addition you could submit your works to the international juried design awards and competitions, or national award programs. The best approach is to do everything; join awards, contact mediators, and of course push yourself as well, to create the biggest impact, and to turn yourself into a design start within months.Exerpt:Promoting good design is one of the easiest PR tasks. Good design itself is usually well demanded by any audiences (i.e. by both readers and editors of publications) thanks to the visual appeal, emotionally provoking aspects and relevance to needs. On the other hand, promoting mediocre design is indeed one of the hardest PR tasks since the limited editorial space deserves better content.Good design is viral; people share it by sending to others or publishing through social networking websites, i..